Batchelor Party

John Batchelor is a radio host on WABC, the New York outlet for unhinged right-wing haters like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Mark Levin. I’ve occasionally caught snatches of Batchelor’s program. He is a conservative, or a neoconservative (he’s interested in foreign-policy minutiae), but, in contrast to Limbaugh et al, he is not an obvious sociopath. His show sometimes conveys actual information. He does not appear to be aggressively anti-intellectual. Faint praise, I know, but remember the context: talk radio. Anyway, Batchelor has an entertaining man-bites-dog polemic today at the Daily Beast, the Web site helmed by our distinguished former editor, Tina Brown. A sample:

What about the Republican Party right now? Isn’t it on radio and TV claiming to be the party of fiscal responsibility and American power? Bypassing the stupidity of these claims, I am on radio, on what is called right-wing radio, and it is easy for me to see that my loudest colleagues, who compulsively repeat the cant of Conservatism for Dummies, are not sincere students of the Republican Party but rather barkers, hookers, establishmentarian jesters, cultists, and, in the worst instance, just thatch-headed whiners. Fox News is a parade of wet-eared Republican office holders, yet there is usually just one each allowed of the categories the Democrats own in multitudes: a Jewish-American, an Asian-American, an African-American, a Hispanic-American. Then there is the beauty pageant of fast-talking, rude Fox blondes—if they are not all the same woman in mood swings—who stridently mock the Democrats, yet have almost nothing to say about the Republicans, as if the party was a disappointing ex or mother’s latest beau.

Batchelor has more, in a tone sharper than anything I’ve heard him say on the radio about liberals. This whole conservative crack-up promises to be a fascinating sidebar to the Obama Era.

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. He regularly blogs about politics.